Boland, Ryan, Szuber, Hirshfield -- + 3 Witches 10/31

Eaven Boland: The Pomegranate
Kay Ryan: Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard
Janusz Szuber: About a Boy Stirring Jam
Jane Hirshfield

From MacBeth: 3 witches and "boil caldron, boil and bubble"

Reading well-crafted poems allows the magic of language -- stirred i' the charmed pot!
The Pomegrante: a new spin on an old tale.
I moves through the poem as speaker, as mother, as invitation for the reader to become the other known as I, and Ceres, through past to present. The pomegranate is the SOUND in Frenc of apple -- which opens up the garden of Eden, as well as the gates of Hell. What do we know about a child's hunger? How can we protect the ones we love. A mother can only give her beloved daughter rifts in time...
"If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift."

This poem "In a Time of Violence", 1994 addresses
more than the teenage appetite that is hungry --
or a simple Adam and Eve reference, connection to Iraq through the Pomegranate... or application of the Greek myth to modern-day life.

If Yeats and Sylvia Plath had a love child, it would be Eaven Boland... she captures, mood, movement, time, speaking in fragments, short bursts of sentences which contrast with the lone nine-line sentence of the daughter plucking the pomegranate.

**
Kay Ryan's poems always bear up well under scrutiny, revealing that less is a well-condensed and pithy "more". She starts and ends with the same sentence -- but the title gives a different sense than the ending sentence. Coupled with her sense of humor is a broad depth, sprinkled into short lines. Why is running the same rut hard? or the wearing down of things? or ending in a small box? What is grand and damaging about walking in the public parade, as opposed to wondering at the marks on the every day, private things we touch.



**
Szuber's poem about a boy stirring jam from the blather is pulpy plum and snapshot of the details of making jam -- at first green and unappetizing, but then rich and dark purple, although the poem doesn't mention this. The language is alive, as if hand-crafted by someone who remembers a moment when they are young, and call it forth, alive -- like all unmentioned details, but fully knowing "each particle of time has an ultimate dimension."